Henry Blodget passes along this revealing Mary Meeker graph on how bloated entitlement programs now comprise a staggering 58% of federal government expenditures and a corresponding portion of the $1.3 trillion federal deficit.

In his wonderfully lucid style, the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins follows up with this column in which he explains how this system is intrinsically unsustainable, but also fixable:

Nobody should be surprised that public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are fighting to preserve every penny of their promised benefits.[ .  .  .]

.   .  . this fight was penciled in long ago, when politicians and union leaders made the strategic decision to negotiate benefits without negotiating for the funding to make good on them. The mock shock and horror is all the more laughable given that events in Wisconsin are a perfect microcosm of the battle that every sentient American knows, and has known for a generation, awaits Medicare and Social Security.

Medicare is the real killer. According to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, an average couple retiring last year can look forward to consuming Medicare benefits with a present value of $343,000, having paid Medicare taxes with a present value of $109,000. [.  .  .]

The flip side of this depressing consideration, though, is a happier one. Moving toward a system of real savings, in which payroll taxes would flow into some version of personal accounts controlled by the worker, would bring a big improvement to incentives. We could expect a sizeable growth dividend to help finance the transition.

By "finance the transition," of course, we mean today’s workers having to reach into their own pockets twice, paying for their own retirement while also making up for the saving their parents and grandparents didn’t do. When people talk about generational injustice, this is what they mean. But the pain can be lightened and spread more evenly with borrowing. Here’s where we should not be afraid of debt. The bond market can be trusted to distinguish between good debt and bad debt–between borrowing to fix the system and borrowing to prop it up.

The global bond market demonstrably still has confidence in America even today, in the absence of a clear path of reform. How much more willing would investors be to advance us money if it were being used to put the entitlement state on a sound, pro-growth footing? By the same token, if we don’t at some point justify the market’s current confidence in our future, our comeuppance will be swift and overwhelming.

This is the entire political challenge today, and you cannot shower enough contempt on those politicians who try to stonewall reform by exciting fears in the elderly that they will be left out in the cold.  .  .  .

Recent past generations of Americans survived the challenges of the Great Depression and World War II to help provide a prosperous economy and great wealth for citizens.

Will the current generations of Americans accept the responsibility to take on the challenge of sustaining that prosperity?